Chennai, July 30 (IANS): Filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma has decided to auction his upcoming yet-untitled Telugu action thriller as he aims to revolutionise the existing model of film distribution that treats cinema as a commercial product.
Varma confirmed the news via his Facebook page Wednesday.
"Yes, I and Vishnu Manchu are going to auction our new action/crime thriller produced by Mohan Babu corporation through a system aimed at revolutionizing the existing distribution system of the Telugu film industry," RGV posted on the social networking platform Wednesday.
"Our new distribution model of auctioning a film comes as an extension of a thought that if cinema is treated as a commercial product then its only purpose is to reach the maximum number of consumers.
"But the difference is that unlike a commercial product which is definite in its features, a film sells emotions whose effect will differ from person to person," he added.
Varma has adopted this model of distribution because it's "impossible to predict the fate of a film".
"Some of my films worked and some didn't but as long as my genuine intention is established to make very uniquely structured path breaking films in terms of style and content it becomes impossible for even me to predict which film will be received how," he said.
"With regard to the content of the film whether it will work or not, why would me or any other director spend 6 months of our time and work hard if the intention is not to genuinely try to make a film that will entertain the audience for two hours," he added.
He quoted some examples of his own films.
"My very high budgeted film 'Daud' with the top stars of that day Sanjay Dutt, Urmila and AR Rahman after 'Rangeela' was a failure and my next very low budget film 'Satya' with sweaty faces and zero production values became a huge hit," he said.
Forget me for a second, but there are numerous examples of a big star cast film collecting much lesser than a low budget film like 'Prema Kadha Chitram', RGV posted.
He says a film should be evaluated by "anyone" and "everyone" and not just by distributes and buyers.
"When it has been proven that no one can predict any film what follows further in this thought system is that instead of the product being evaluated by 2 or 3 so called buyers, we for our film are opting to open up our film's evaluation for anyone and everyone to participate in their individual capacities in its business," he said.
"This comes from my belief that instead of a buyer of West Godavari deciding the value of 'Palakollu' sitting in Bheemavaram or some other place, I would rather want a resident of Palakollu decide that price for himself since he himself is from Palakollu," RGV added.
The filmmaker says even college students or friends from an IT firm can buy his film.
"This film can be bought by 3-4 students pooling some money in Guntur or by a group of housewiveswives sitting at a kitty party in Vizag or by 2 friends who work in an IT company in Hyderabad. In short, any of the film watchers can come into film business. Such is the beauty of this model," he said.
"For a movie lover to own this film in a theatre near his city/town/village, it would cost nothing more than prices varying from as low as 50,000 to 3,50,000 (Depending on the area)," Ramu added.
RGV will announce the details of the model with cost on his website www.filmauction.in, which will go live Saturday from 9 a.m.